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“What Is Writing?”

Normally, I won’t be emulating the prompts I give you, on account of my work for this course is a great deal different than yours (for one thing, your job as a student is harder! I got to learn all of this last quarter…) This time around, however, the prompt absolutely applies to me, because of the amount of writing of yours that I’ll be reading.

I’m aware that your answers and those of your classmates will vary greatly, and I’m going to make all of you roll your eyes when I tell you that I’m an absolute NERD for writing. I like working in multiple genres, INCLUDING academic writing (although it doesn’t come as natural to me as what I write for fun.)

Tied directly to this is my love for reading. I read for escapism, I read to study the styles of writers I admire, and while I don’t start reading to critique it, my training as an English student has lead me to start doing that for fun as well.

Writing to me has a load of different purposes, and no one of them is generally more important to me that others—different moments call for different forms of writing, with different intentions to inspire the writer. I do, however, have favorite purposes—catharsis, world-building, and character development in creative genres, re-interpretations and suggesting possibilities in academic and rhetorical writing.

If I were to try and discuss one that covered all of the different styles of writing that I do, or that I read, I would say that writing is one of the best ways that we humans have come up with to circulate an idea. Writing stays as long as there’s a copy of the material, it lasts as long as someone is reading it, and—this is the coolest part to me—everybody who reads it finds their own interpretation of it, and if they discuss it, whether verbally or in their own writing, they’re evolving the original idea, expanding it into something bigger than just one person’s work.

By the way, my writing in this genre doesn’t usually resemble my classwork so closely, and yours is under no obligation to do so—feel free to experiment with your writing style in your own blog.